CALLING CARDS PUBLISHING PRESENTS: ADAM MATSCHULAT – FORMOSA ALBUM LAUNCH
ADAM MATSCHULAT
Formosa is composer Adam Matschulat’s first major work under his own full name, a deeply personal album of field recordings capturing sounds from kitchens, churches, forests and farmyards in a compositional net of musique concrète that speaks directly to his family’s history in the south of Brazil, exploring what it means to feel safe.
Formosa is in the South of Brazil, where his mother’s family emigrated from Prussia in the 1880s. His great-great grandfather built a church there, which still stands and where the congregation still sing from 1850s German hymn books. The role of preacher passed down in the family to his grandfather, who played accordion and worked his farm as the patriarch of what remains a pious community surrounded by forest.
The album is made of two-side long distinct compositions. The first explores his connection between mortality and the land, structured around warp and weft of place and conversation. From a distance, the scene appears to be straightforward field recordings of a working farm; of conversations around a table; wobbling German songs with halting accordion on a bed of night-time insect sounds; of hymns once removed by tape static as if remembered, or as a sonic symbol of psychological detachment. Closer listening reveals astute collaging and electro-acoustic manipulations.
The two pieces on Formosa are meditations on everyday connections to home and family, and more broadly on notions of life, death and belonging. It is an album about the significance of our everyday sonic worlds that creates a teleology of place, and a psychological cartography of safety and home.
Adam Matschulat is a London based composer and sound designer. His approach to composition and performance are deeply influenced by musique concrete and Grotowski’s poor theatre. He is a multifaceted storyteller focused in rendering internal psychological research to sonic experience, using field recording as materia prima.
“The composition’s subject is my relationship to Formosa’s landscape; its history, its fauna, its flora and its magic. This is where my Germanic descendants emigrated to in the South of Brazil. The place is permeated with mystery, from its past, from its pious residents and from the land itself. Through the recordings I’ve made over the years I investigate notions of family, safety, emotional reciprocation with nature and what it means to belong.”
Adam Matschulat is a Brazilian composer, sound designer and engineer. His diverse output of sound works have included electroacoustic composition, musique concrete, field recording, and structural noise music. He operates in pursuit of the feeling of safety and the exploration of psychological states, rendering sonic experiences that are psychological investigations in and of themselves.
www.adamatschulat.com
MARK VERNON
Mark Vernon is a sound and radio artist whose practice is focused upon concepts of audio archaeology, magnetic memory and nostalgia. Operating on the fringes of sound art, music and broadcasting, his works main concerns are with field recording, the manipulation of environmental sounds and the power of the disembodied voice. A rich collection of domestic tape recordings; audio letters, dictated notes, answer-phone messages and other lost voices often find their way into his bewitching soundworlds. A keen advocate of radio as an art form, he also co-runs and curates Glasgow’s art radio station, Radiophrenia. His solo and collaborative music projects have been published through labels including Kye, Staalplaat, Flaming Pines, Ultra Eczema, Entr’acte, 3Leaves, Misanthropic Agenda and Canti Magnetici.
OLIVER PIT (AKASHIC RECORDS )DJ SET
